


Making it

by keysmash



Category: IT
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, Past Child Abuse, Past Domestic Abuse, Yuletide 2010
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:56:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keysmash/pseuds/keysmash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I loved your prompt for this fandom, 24_centuries, but somehow wound up writing something different than what you'd asked for. It's similar, at least, and I really hope you enjoy it.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Making it

**Author's Note:**

  * For [24_centuries](https://archiveofourown.org/users/24_centuries/gifts).



> I loved your prompt for this fandom, 24_centuries, but somehow wound up writing something different than what you'd asked for. It's similar, at least, and I really hope you enjoy it.

They called Mike from the front desk. Bill held the phone while the other three stood watching him. The employee who'd nodded when they asked about calling was by the window again, where he'd been when they walked inside. He was paying attention to the street outside instead of to the group of people getting grime on his desk as they leaned against it.

They were all still soaking wet, their clothes stained a more or less uniform shade of brown, and Beverly knew they had to stink, even though she didn't notice it right now. Maybe she'd gotten used to it; maybe the stink they'd left on the other side of that tiny door blew everything else out of the water. Or maybe she was just tired. She couldn't remember ever being quite this exhausted before, as if she could sink into a bed, or a couch, or maybe just the carpet behind the desk, and stay there until her bladder or her stomach woke her up again.

She leaned back against the desk, resting her elbows on the surface, and looked at Bill next to her. He was facing the desk with the phone at his ear and pinching the bridge of his nose, staring down at the wood. It was an old enough desk that it'd been a tree for a while, and Beverly closed her eyes as she let it take her weight. She heard one of the others come to stand on her other side, and she moved her foot a little to nudge against theirs in recognition. They didn't say anything, but she knew without looking that it'd be Ben, and when she did open her eyes, facing him, she found him matching her position, watching her.

She kicked his boot again, and they both made the same expression — almost a wince, almost a grin — when something splattered wetly to the floor. "You doing alright?" she asked.

Ben made the face again, grinning only slightly more this time. "Rain check," he said. "I don't think I can tell right now."

"Today's the day for rain checks, I think," she said, and glanced towards the windows. What was left of the street was filling up with people: people dressed in uniforms, both business-casual and the kind you'd see on the people waiting on your table and working on your car; people walking without raincoats or umbrellas, like they'd driven away from their homes that morning and had been reducing to walking through the wet sometime since then; people hurrying towards the cracks in the ground and people wandering, aimless. People everywhere, Beverly thought, and none of them knew what had really happened. She moved her foot against Ben's again and kept it there, the side of her shoe touching the side of his boot.

Richie, who'd joined the clerk in staring out the window for a while, whistled loudly enough Beverly could hear him across the lobby, and then he shook his head and came back to join the rest of them. "Don't take this the wrong way, Bev," he said when he reached them, still looking over his shoulder, "but I really preferred the way we got out the first time."

Bill didn't look away from the desk, and on her other side, Ben glanced at her quickly, but Beverly shook her head and laughed quietly. "I'd be more likely to take it the wrong way if you didn't," she said. Richie shook his head again and glanced at Bill, and Beverly did, too. His eyes were closed now, and even the skin on the top of his head was dirty. He was tapping one finger against the receiver, and Beverly was suddenly sure that he'd asked about Audra first, instead of Mike.

They'd have to start pulling away from each other at some point; Beverly couldn't spend the rest of her life feeling as closely attached to these men as she did right now. She turned to Ben instead, met his gaze, and glanced away when she recognized the expression on his face. He looked physically different now than he had when they were kids, his cheekbones whittled into clear relief and his jaw darkening with stubble, but she'd seen that set to his eyes before, that same almost-frown on his brow. This was the way Ben looked at her when he thought she wasn't watching, and Beverly had seen it a thousand times that summer. She looked back out the window instead and swallowed hard, suspecting she was blushing under the layer of grime on her face.

It it hadn't been for Bill, spinning heavily in the center of Beverly's universe and pulling everything in towards himself, then maybe she would have seen Ben for what he was, what he wanted. She'd seen him anyway, in spite of Bill, and maybe she'd gone home with Bill the night before, but she'd known then that it wouldn't last. Audra had been — not in bed with them, not even in the room, but maybe out in the hallway. The thought of her had been between them even before they were floating her body out of the darkness together, and part of Beverly had known things wouldn't last with Bill. She'd thought that would be because one or both of them wouldn't be around to see it through, but it came to the same thing in the end.

She closed her eyes against the scene in the street and leaned further against the counter. It pressed her closer to both of them, Bill on one side and Ben on the other, but Ben was the only one who moved in response. He shifted his weight onto the foot closest to her, taking her weight and giving some of his own back for Beverly to support, and she smiled without opening her eyes as Bill straightened up and said, "Yes, my name is Bill D-Denbrough, and I need to check the status of a couple of p-p-patients."

.

 

After Bill got off the phone, they separated to their own rooms, on their own floors. Richie got off first, without saying anything more than goodbye, and then Bill on the third floor. He had Audra's information on a piece of paper in his hand, and he kissed first Beverly and then Ben on the cheek before stepping out of the elevator. Beverly raised her eyebrows at Ben after the doors slid and closed, and he shrugged, shaking his head, as they started going up again.

"She'll be alright," he said, and briefly touched his fingertips to his cheek before turning back to the door. "That web... She'll get better now that she's out of it."

"I hope so," Beverly said, and looked towards the door as it slid open again. The fourth floor, Ben's stop, and then she'd be on her own again for however long. She wasn't sure how she felt about that at all.

He looked at her and smiled briefly, and Beverly reached for him, touching his wrist with two fingers. Her clothes were still damp, and his own must be also, but his skin was dry. He glanced down at their hands, and she let her fingers fall away, but he looked back to her face. She saw his throat work as he swallowed. She didn't know what she was going to say, or really even why she'd stopped him.

The elevator door started to close again, and Ben turned away only long enough to punch the Door Open button, then looked back at her, quietly intense.

"Are you going to be alright?" Beverly asked, and the question was entirely wrong for the situation — of course, he wouldn't, no more than she would — but it'd been the best thing she could come up with.

"I'll sleep," he said, neatly dodging the question, and took her hand again. He squeezed her fingers and made to let go, but Beverly held onto him this time, just for a moment. "Don't leave town without saying goodbye, okay?"

"I wouldn't," Beverly said.

She could remember saying goodbye to the others as one by one they moved away. With Ben, she'd gone down to his house while his mother was wrapping up the last of her paperwork at the plant. She'd been there before, waiting with one of the other guys for him to finish his chores and come to play, but she'd rarely been inside, and had certainly never been in his bedroom until she'd sat on his stripped-bare mattress and helped him pack away the rest of his paperbacks. There'd been the same promises to write as when the first of them left, Stan or maybe Eddie, and no desperate declarations of love, but Ben gave her a necklace she thought might have been his mother's, a piece of costume jewelry that was still too adult to ever let her father see it hanging between her collarbones, and Beverly had thrown her arms around his neck before leaving him to his boxes, recognizing the feel of his body against hers but not examining the knowledge.

He was wearing the same expression now — not a similar one, not one that merely resembled the way he'd looked with more flesh and fewer lines on his face, but the exact same combination of features. He was frowning a little, with his eyes moving back and forth across her face like he was still trying to learn her, and his jaw was set, probably so his mouth wouldn't quaver at all.

"I don't even know where I'm going after this," Beverly continued, and looked away, shrugging down at the carpet. "So don't worry about me."

The door tried to close again, and this time she squeezed his hand and let go.

"Call my room when you wake up," he said, and she nodded at him before he stepped outside. He turned around just beyond the elevator and instead of heading down to his room, watched her without smiling as the doors closed. Beverly met his gaze, and in the seconds they had before the elevator went up a few feet higher, she didn't try to smile, either. She let everything show on her face — her exhaustion, the last dregs of fear and adrenaline, her relief — and just before the doors met between them, Ben nodded at her. Beverly closed her eyes and waited for her floor.

.

 

Cleaning up was easier now than it had been as a girl.

She didn't have to worry about beating her parents home, so she could hide her filthy clothes from her mother, and just hide in general from her father. She didn't have to make dinner and clean up the apartment after everyone ate. She didn't have to watch her step to keep from betraying the deep ache between her thighs.

She didn't have to worry about what she'd find on the other side as she unlocked the door. It wouldn't be her father home early, or Tom with a lesson all planned out in his head, or It wearing either or both of their faces. It wouldn't be anything but her unused bed, her suitcases open on the floor by the window, and when she got inside, that was all there was.

She locked everything that would bolt or turn on the door and then stripped down, throwing her clothes towards the trash can on her way to the bathroom. She wanted a bath, to soak in warm water and bubbles until the pain in her joints slipped away, but she wanted to sleep more than that, and it would be pretty stupid to make it through everything only to drown in the tub. So she showered instead, turning the water as hot as she could bear it and standing beneath the shower head until the water flowing off her body was all clear and clean. She crawled into bed without putting on pajamas or doing anything more than brushing her teeth and combing her hair. She was asleep before she could hope she wouldn't dream.

.

 

The room was full of sunlight when Beverly woke up. She was hungry and thirsty and needed to pee all at once, and she blinked at the clock on the bedside table as she tried to figure out which need to tend to first. It was 2:13, and it took Beverly a while to realize that she must have slept through one day and into the next. She hadn't heard housekeeping knock on the door, and hadn't heard the phone ring, even though someone had called. The light was blinking, and she had at least one message she wasn't going to check until later.

She remembered what she'd told Ben in the elevator, but she dressed and headed down to the lobby without calling, anyway. She didn't want to wake him if he'd been sleeping as hard as she had; in fact, she liked the idea of him having a chance to relax after the past week, his long limbs stretched across the bed.

Bill and Richie probably needed the rest just as much, and so she nodded to the girl behind the counter and went outside by herself, walking until she found a bench to sit on. The street was a wreck, with the pavement contorted into great dips and bubbles. The ground hadn't actually sunk away here, but although there were plenty of people out and about — some clearly rescue workers, but most looking like Beverly felt, as if she had to come see because she didn't know what else to do — no one was driving. She didn't know if an official announcement had been made about the roads or if the city was collectively not pushing its luck, but everyone she saw was walking. There was a girl maybe ten years younger than Beverly across the street, wearing one of Beverly's dresses from the previous year's line, and Bev smiled to herself as she watched her approach the curb and look down at the road like it might buckle before her eyes.

She'd have to get back to the business eventually, of course, but so much of it was tied up in Tom's name, and she didn't know what to do about that, besides filing a missing persons report.

She opened her purse and took out her cigarettes, leaving the pack on her thigh while she lit and smoked the first one. It'd been more than twenty-four hours since her last smoke, and a few days of heavy smoking after having gone without for far too long before that, and Beverly had to close her eyes against the heady rush of nicotine through her system. It was good enough to make her fingers and toes tingle.

She was rubbing the first butt into the sidewalk and finding her lighter for the next cigarette in the chain when Ben slid onto the bench next to her. He didn't sit near enough that they were touching, but he wasn't far away, either. They were close enough that they could touch, if either of them wanted to, and Beverly's heart flipped a little to the side.

She paused with the cigarette between her lips and looked at him, watching his face as he took in the street in front of them. His cheeks were clean-shaven, his hair was still damp, and he smelled like the soap Beverly had used before she tumbled into bed the day before. She guessed he'd done what she hadn't bothered to, and had showered after waking up.

Beverly flicked her lighter and sucked in that first drag, and then took the cigarette out of her mouth. "You want one?"

He shook his head. "I don't smoke much," he said, and then amended that with, "Not normally, anyway."

"I had quit for a while," she said, and sucked in another satisfyingly big lungful. "Hard to see why now." She crossed her legs, aiming the top one towards him, and Ben looked at the plain shoes she'd worn traveling before he slid one arm along the back of the bench. He didn't touch her, but she glanced at his face anyway and shifted slightly closer to him as well.

"I keep thinking I should want to help," he said. He nodded towards the street, and Beverly knew the gesture was aimed beyond the cracked pavement in front of them, to include the entire town. "But I don't."

"We already did help," Beverly said. She tapped her ashes onto the ground, then frowned at the cigarette and put it out half-smoked. She still had the rest of the pack, and she could light another one whenever she needed it. She sighed and leaned closer still, so her shoulder brushed against his chest. His steady breathing stuttered for a moment as he held his breath, and then he let his air out in a rush and relaxed again. He felt warm through their clothes, and Beverly smiled to herself.

"We did," he said.

"And I don't want to stay here too much longer," Beverly said. She hadn't known it was true until she said it, but she wanted to leave Derry again. Derry was a bad home. The one she'd made as an adult wasn't much better, and neither place sounded like a good idea right now. Beverly needed something new, something of her own design.

"I was thinking about heading out myself in a few days," Ben said, still looking across the road. "Back to Nebraska."

"I've never been there," Beverly said, and it was true. She'd travelled a lot for work, but Nebraska was hardly a big name in the fashion world. She looked at him, wanting to bite her lip at the slight flush in his face.

"Come with me," he said, and turned to meet her gaze. "Let's take a trip."

"Run away together?" she said. She was teasing a little, but it echoed so many unspoken thoughts from her childhood. How many times had she wanted to leave, and then pushed the thought out of her mind on her own, without anything making her forget? It had been the biggest dream of all, and she'd barely been able to acknowledge it.

"Something like that," he said. His gaze flickered back and forth over her face again, and Beverly smiled suddenly, widely enough to make her cheeks ache.

"Something like that," she repeated. She stared at him a moment longer, then turned back to the road before she had to kiss him. She didn't want that here; she wanted to save that for later.

The road creaked ominously and then stilled. Ben moved his hand from the bench to her shoulder, and Beverly moved still closer to him. They were done with Derry, just waiting to leave; things were finally, finally settled.


End file.
